Thursday, March 9, 2017

One Last Pick Thru the Bins Vol. 17: Odd Future. In Which I Really Stretch

Odd Future gained notoriety (maybe of an extraordinary local
kind) for telling its teenage fans to kill their parents. Maybe that was on the
cover art to something they put out, I don’t know. What I do know is that I’m
the object of that sentiment, not the subject. Just so we’re all on the same
page. Still, my oldest daughter lost her goddamn mind about Odd Future, and I’m
still alive, so there’s that, too.

I didn’t put too much time into Odd Future, because I
understand that they’re not for me. I’m also close to certain that I would
never have picked up any of their stuff had my daughter not turned on to them
like only a teenage boy can. (No typo.) Still, I wound up with The OF Tape Vol. 2
in my bins…and it wasn’t some half-assed attempt to “bond” with my daughter
either. First of all, that shit doesn’t work; the last thing your kid wants to
do with her parent is geek out over music. But she listened to them – and a lot – and I drove her to couple concerts, and kids have that thing about playing
the band they’re about to go see on their way to the show, so they sorta became
background noise to our lives for a couple years. And, if you’re curious enough
about music, you find yourself listening to them one day. Sure, you’re listening
to what your daughter is listening to…but it’s less about figuring out what she’s
listening to, than whether or not you actually like it.

In case you’re not familiar, Odd Future was (and sort of is)
a Los Angeles-based hip hop collective, one that included guys like Tyler the
Creator, Frank Ocean, and Earl Sweatshirt, but also associated/included acts
like Jet Age of Tomorrow and The Internet, plus guys that I only heard my
daughter say, but now know better, like Hodgy Beats, Domo Genesis, and Mike G.
(Did I get how all that shit fits together loosely right? Eh…not so much; I
mean, there’s a whole mythology at play here, within the albums and outside
them, so read more here and here; I mean, all that’s good to know – and some of
latest news hit me as weirdly encouraging for reasons I’ll get to in the
closing – but that’s not the focus here). (So…what is?)

Because I have stuff by Tyler and Earl and Frank Ocean and
Jet Age of Tomorrow and…shit, never mind. Because I have some amount of Odd
Future’s solo work elsewhere, I decided to limit the review of Odd Future to
the two mixtapes (fuck, I dunno if they’re mixtapes; just…things, OK? Bodies of
work they put out), 12 Odd Future Songs and The OF Tape Vol. 2. I’ll get to
those solo projects later, and that only makes more sense after listening to
two of Odd Future’s “official” releases.

There’s one line in “NY (Ned Flanders)” from The OF Tape
Vol. 2 that sort of acknowledges what the whole project is about: “I'm sneaking
in your kid's ear lobe; ‘Oh, no! It's him! Goblin!’” It’s a lot of pushing
buttons, basically, wallowing in teen angst, real, imagined and amplified. Here’s
where I pick up the parenthetical in the intro: I’ve met flesh-and-blood human
beings who said to me, and emphatically, “They’re telling their fans to kill
their parents! How is that OK!?”

It’s OK the same way violent video games are OK: if real
human beings were truly as open to suggestion as half the goddamn world says
they are, we’d all be dodging bullets throughout our commutes and swinging at
each other with kitchen knives over the dinner table every night. When you give
teenage boys/men a platform to speak their minds, they’ll talk pissed off –
especially when the artist in question isn’t great on his dad (that’d be “Bastard”; OK, Tyler plays useful piano).
Or, to take the worst collection of lyrics I heard from Tyler, they’ll talk
about filming a sex slave he keeps in his basement (“French”). If there’s one
emotion young males access clearer and more readily than any other, it’s anger.
Guys of a certain age and disposition are pissed off all the damn time, so, if
you ask them what they think, they’ll answer graphically. Your kid responds to that
– even if it’s your daughter – because she’s pissed off at the world. I was
too, and still am on several levels.

For all that, when you’ve got Fear’s “Let’s Have a War” (is
it?) 40 years in your rear view, or if you’ve sat through John Waters’ Pink Flamingos a couple, three times, the stuff you hear in Odd Future’s repertoire
doesn’t feel all that groundbreaking to you. Teen rage is timeless (also, not part of Pink Flamingos; that's more Female Trouble); it’s just the
specifics of its expression that change with the times.

To finally get to the music, “I sorta hate this one” comes up more often than I’d like in
my notes. The short list of tracks on that include “Bankrolls,” “Lean,” plus “Bitches,”
and “Real Bitch” (which, today, feels like a long alt-right twitter thread;
also, guys, “bitches” again? On the same album?). Just comparing songs, though,
sells the collective narrative power of Odd Future short. I think you get a
better contrast by the cold calm of “Bastard” and the superior atmospherics of “Analog 2” against the amped-up rage/sound of “50” or “We Got Bitches.” As much as this
sounds like a nitpick, Odd Future feels more…right to me when they’re dead
behind the eyes. Maybe it’s disposition, but I’ve always found screaming and
shouting far, far less unnerving than someone quietly explaining just how fucked
up everything is, and how fucked up you are, in particular.

I might have crossed up songs in there, but that’s an effect
of Odd Future’s thematic sameness. To reframe that, I can remember the rage I
felt as a teenager, but I can’t access it anymore. A proportionate collection
of exceptions aside (e.g., kids with real problems), most teenage problems are
trivia, and outright bullshit in the most embarrassing situations; they’re
angry because they’re angry and, the further you get from that, and the deeper
you get into real-life problems, the more tedious that feels. (On a related
note, that last sentence skims the surface of why most teenagers shut out their
parents and other adults.)

Yeah, yeah, enough old guy shit. I did find
things to like in the “official” Odd Future oeuvre. I found that I liked just about
anything that gave Mike G primary billing, but most of all “Forest Green” and “King.”
None of Odd Future’s stuff hits me musically, but Mike G has the best flow of
the bunch for me (and it’s not even close). With the other stuff, I like the vocal
hook in “VCR” (the “press my buttons” thing), and I liked the tracks they put
on for The Internet, even if not immensely. A couple “non-Mike G” tracks stand
out for me – here, I’m thinking “Sam (Is Dead),” and for the line about Kurt
Kobain alone (damn!) – but that also feels like a great opening for one last
jab…

After listening to the Odd Future collections one last time
today, I popped over to Quasimoto, an artist I love (and that Odd Future
members give a shout out to in a couple places), to compare his sound against
theirs. If you pick through all the songs in this post, you’ll have a pretty
good idea of what Quasimoto/Madlib does. Quasimoto evokes more moods, and tells
different kinds of stories, and better ones too; Odd Future, on the other hand, spits contempt and
anger that borders on murderous; the broad starkness of most of their music
builds on that vaguely psychopathic vibe, the sense of feeling so much that you
stop feeling. That artistic integrity is neat and all, but, dark thoughts lose their power to shock when that's all you talk about and, musically, I find their relentless spareness boring, frankly. That’s part of why (again), the best song I can find
outside the stuff by The Internet (“They Say” and “Ya Know”) would be “Rok Rok.”
There’s some layering going over the looping in that one. But, again, that’s
personal preference tangoing with age in a semi-geriatric dance, so…

By way of closing, I want to credit Odd Future’s artists on
a couple levels. Their sound matches their tone really, really well on a lot of
tracks. The ominous buzzing, those digitized violins on “67” fit a mood that’s
best described as threatening, the idea of The Purge brought to life inside
your own household. That’s a mood and a moment that caught fire for a reason.
Second, and this picks up on the biographical links way up there (the "here" and "here," things, the second one, in particular), I’m genuinely excited to see how a couple of these guys grow into actual adulthood. As
Odd Future, these guys were geniuses on the very specific level of being pissed
off teenagers. How cleanly they hit that vibe makes one wonder what they can do
with expressing each of their personal evolution.

And, one last thought: I think it’s goddamn brilliant that
the youth can still come out with something that scares the shit out of adults.
That’s what the teenage years are for, goddammit! This was my daughter’s punk
rock, basically, and they share the same atonality as a punk band, or for a lot
of the same reasons (most of which start and end with “fuck it!”). And that’s a
good thing!